Latest / 21st Century Dating Decoded!™ / Speed Mingle Dating Slang of the Week : Grim-Keeping
Transcript
- Brad Peters: Confused by modern dating terms? Master the slang with speed mingle! You th studies show that if you want to like guarantee a second date with someone you just met, you really shouldn't spend the evening talking about the things you absolutely love. Right, which completely upends everything we're taught. You're not supposed to bond over your shared passion for ⁓ hiking or Italian cinema or cooking. Yeah, exactly. Instead, you should figure out what the other person absolutely despises and just bond over that. It's wild. We're raised on this idea that shared joy is the foundation of intimacy, right? But neurologically speaking, shared irritation is a much faster, much stronger adhesive. Which is both fascinating and I mean, honestly, slightly terrifying when you think about the implications. ⁓ absolutely. Welcome to a brand new deep dive, everyone. Today we are looking at the modern romantic lexicon. We're unpacking this massive cultural shift in how we date, how we connect, and You know, how we talk about those connections. Specifically, we're looking at this rising trend where shared negativity is becoming like the ultimate matchmaker. Yeah, because the language we use to describe our romantic lives is evolving so fast. It has to, just to keep pace with how complex dating has become. I mean, we're trying to navigate this paradox where we want deeply authentic connections, but we're utilizing incredibly elaborate, often defensive behaviors and frankly a highly cynical slang to find them. Totally. And to get to the bottom of this, we are synthesizing some really compelling material today. Yes, a really great stack of sources. We're pulling data from the Plenty of Fish, eighth annual dating trends report, which surveyed, I think, nearly six thousand singles. Yep, six thousand. Alongside linguistic analyses of Gen Z internet slang, psychological studies on human bonding, Mark Manson's work on toxic relationship habits, and even some really cool strategic dating advice from Older demographics who are just completely changing the game. It's a broad spectrum, but it all connects. Our mission here is to map out this landscape. We want to figure out why we're using shared hatreds to find love, and more importantly, how you can spot the difference between an authentic connection and a toxic trap in your own life. Because that line is incredibly thin, isn't it? ⁓ razor thin. The behaviors that make us feel safe and understood on a first date are often the exact same behaviors that, well, tear a relationship apart five years later. So as you listen, think about your own relational portfolio. Whether you're actively navigating the dating apps right now, or you know, maybe you've been married for a decade and are just baffled by the terminology your single friends are using. Right. Like what does that word even mean? Exactly. Or if you're just fascinated by how human psychology adapts to modern technology, there is something in this for you. Let's look at the actual data driving this shift. Let's do it. I was going through the findings from the Plenty of Fish survey. The trends defined in the class of twenty twenty five. And what struck me immediately was how heavily social media, TikTok, pop culture, how they aren't just reflecting romance anymore. No, they're dictating it. They are dictating the mechanics of it. Yes. And the feedback loop between MIDI consumption and real world expectation ⁓ has I mean, it's never been tighter. Never. The most prominent trend in the data, affecting about a third of all daters, is a concept they're calling smutton. Smutton. I had to read the definition of this twice, I'm not gonna lie. It's a great portmanteau, right? Smut and smitten. Yeah, and it's defined as fantasizing that your real life will eventually mirror the storylines of romantic TV shows, movies, or books. Now, on the surface, that sounds like a tale as old as time. Sure, people have wanted movie magic romance since well, movies were invented. But the data shows this massive disparity. Like forty percent of women report experiencing this compared to Only twenty-eight percent of men. Which is significant. And we can trace that disparity directly to the explosive cultural resurgence of escapist romance media. Stuff that is largely targeted toward and consumed by women. Exactly. We're seeing the absolute dominance of like romantic novels, the massive popularity of Regency era period dramas, and the mainstreaming of fanfiction tropes. ⁓ right, tropes like enemies to lovers or friends to lovers. Or the classic forbidden romance. But wait, doesn't holding out for a literal Regency era Duke set you up for massive failure when you're just, you know, swiping through profiles of guys holding fish in their hometown. I mean, yes, it absolutely creates a friction between expectation and reality. However, psychologically speaking, being smutton serves as a highly effective coping mechanism. A coping mechanism for what? Just the chaos of modern dating. Precisely. Think about the structure of a romance novel or a television show. It provides a safe, highly controlled romantic ideal. The characters have clear motivations, the conflicts are guaranteed to resolve beautifully. And there's always an assured emotional payoff. Right. Real world dating offers literally none of that security. It is unpredictable, it's often exhausting, and frequently ends in rejection. So leaning into a fictional ideal isn't necessarily about actually expecting a guy to show up on a horse. No, not at all. It's about seeking the emotional safety that the fiction provides. Exactly. It gives people a framework for what they want to feel. The danger, of course, is that a fictional character never forgets to take out the trash. Right. And they never have a bad day at work where they project their stress onto you. Real human beings are messy. So the smutton ideal can inadvertently create this impossible standard. That no living partner could ever actually meet. Right, which brings us to the messy reality of what actually happens when people try to connect face to face. Yeah, let's talk about that. The survey highlighted a trend that almost half of all daters, 49% have experienced, which they call yap trapping. Yap trapping. It's a highly evocative term, isn't it? It really is. And it's for a very modern iteration of a very old problem. Basically, yap trapping is the experience of being essentially held hostage on a date by someone. Who dominates the conversation entirely? They only talk about themselves. Yep. And they fail to ask a single personal question about you. I've heard horror stories from friends about this. They sit there for two hours, they know the guy's entire childhood trauma, his career aspirations, his like opinion on cryptocurrency. And he doesn't even know her last name. Exactly. Why is this becoming so prevalent that half of the dating pool is complaining about it? Well, it speaks to a profound erosion of conversational reciprocity. We have to look at the environment shaping these individuals. You mean digital communication? Yes. The isolation of digital communication over the last decade has fundamentally rewired how many people interact. We spend an enormous amount of our daily lives in what we could call broadcast mode. Broadcast mode. That makes a lot of sense. Right. We post our thoughts, we curate our images, we update our statuses to an invisible audience. We are Constantly transmitting We are literally the main characters of our own digital feeds. Exactly. And when you take someone who is accustomed to existing in a permanent broadcast mode and place them in a physical one on one dynamic, they often lack the interpersonal agility to switch into reception mode. They literally forget how to be curious. They do. They've lost the muscle memory required to ask questions, hold space for another person's answer, and build a conversational bridge. ⁓ You've just been cast as the studio audience for the live recording of their internal monologue. That's a perfect way to put it. And that lack of reciprocity leaves the other person feeling entirely unseen, which defeats the entire biological and psychological purpose of pair bonding. So if people are exhausted by the curated perfection of the smutton ideal and they're tired of being the studio audience for a Yap trapper, where do they go? The data suggests they are swinging wildly in the opposite direction towards something called freak matching. Freak matching. This was experienced by thirty nine percent of singles, right? Yep. The term is a nod to the pop culture moment. Specifically the Tanaush song about finding someone to match your freak. But sociologically, it represents a desire to connect over shared quirks, eccentricities, and the weird, unpolished parts of our personalities. It feels like a massive rebellion against those Instagram perfect dating profiles that completely dominated the twenty tens. ⁓ for sure. For a long time the goal was to present yourself as this Flawless, well-traveled, universally appealing commodity. Freak matching is the antidote to that commodification. People are burnt out on pretending to be universally appealing because, well, it attracts superficial connections. Right. If you appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one deeply. Exactly. By leading with your eccentricities, you're essentially saying, I am not for everyone, but I might be exactly for you. It requires a significant amount of vulnerability. To show the unvarnished reality of who you are behind closed doors. It really does. Which naturally segues into the next trend, sticking. Sticking with a capital ICK. Yes. Yeah. 36% of people are doing this. We all know the concept of the ick, right? ⁓ yeah, that internet trend of listing tiny superficial things that instantly turn you off. Like, ⁓ he runs weird or she wears toe socks. Right, the ick. Well, sticking is the conscious act of looking past that initial superficial ick and choosing to continue the relationship. The evolution of the ick is fascinating to me. Initially, the internet weaponized these minor infractions as a way to avoid intimacy entirely. It was a convenient excuse to end things before they got serious. ⁓ he clapped at a movie theater, I have to dump him. Exactly. So sticking is being viewed by psychologists and dating coaches as a return to emotional maturity. It's the cognitive, deliberate choice to recognize that a minor annoyance like a bad haircut or a weird laugh. Does not negate a person's overall emotional value. Or their compatibility with you. But looking at all of these terms together smutton, yap trapping, freak matching, sticking I was thinking about the platforms themselves. Dating apps. Yeah. Apps like Plenty of Fish, which the source notes was a pioneer in banning face filters to force authenticity, they rely on algorithms to sort people. Yeah. Are these apps basically turning into a hyper specific digital sorting hat? What do you mean? Well, we used to just hope to meet someone kinds who lived in our zip code. Now we want the algorithm to find someone who matches our exact level of freak, provides the emotional safety of a romance novel, and can survive the app trap test. Aren't we just replacing one form of impossible standard with a new, highly categorized one? That is a profound observation. We're using these heavily constructed slang terms to categorize incredibly nuanced Fluid emotional experiences. We want the technology to sort human beings the way we sort consumer goods. Yes. Filtering by highly specific features. But human connection fundamentally resists that kind of easy categorization. Right. The more granular our labels become, the more we realize that a label cannot capture the totality of a person. Which brings me back to the hook we started with. Because out of all the POF trends for twenty twenty five, there is one specific concept that really stands out. The big one. It completely abandons the search for shared values or shared eccentricities, and instead builds a foundation on shared animosity. They call it grim keeping. Grim keeping. Twenty-eight percent of daters report engaging in this. It's defined as bonding romantically over shared dislikes, pet peeves, and raw annoyances, rather than traditional common interests. So instead of saying I love going to modern art museums, you sit down at the bar and say, I absolutely despise people who play videos on their phone without headphones in a waiting room. And if the other person agrees The spark is instantaneous. It really is. The sources provide a list of these highly relatable, universally frustrating examples. Bonding over a shared hatred for passengers who clap when a plane lands. Ugh, the worst. Or the betrayal of raisins being smuggled into a chocolate chip cookie. The exhaustion of chaotic, crowded bar crawls. The sheer misery of early mornings. Or getting stuck behind a slow walker on a busy sidewalk. Right, all of these things. Okay, before we get into the psychology of why this works. I want to look at the language itself because the fumi AI source provided an incredible linguistic breakdown of the term grim keeping. Let's trace the word grim first. The etymology is crucial here. Grim traces back to the old English root grim, which meant filles, severe, or cruel. Right, like the grim reaper. Or when a doctor says the prognosis is grim, it carries this heavy life or death weight. Historically, yes, but language is fluid. In modern British usage, the word has softened considerably and shifted registers. ⁓ so it's now frequently used to describe a mild everyday displeasure or inconvenience. You might hear someone look out the window at the rain and say, The weather is looking a bit grim today. Or look at an unappealing sandwich and say, That looks grim. Exactly. So it's been downgraded from a fierce severity to a casual everyday annoyance. It belongs to a much lighter emotional register now. Which makes it perfectly suited for describing pet peeves. But the Fumi AI text points out a brilliant grammatical quirk in how Gen Z and modern daters use the compound term. Right. Grimkeeping is almost exclusively used as a noun rather than a verb. Meaning you wouldn't say we were grim keeping at the bar. Correct. The model sentence provided by the research is there was some serious grimkeeping going on. That phrasing creates this strange observational distance, like you're watching yourself do it from across the room. Yes. It's a deliberate, half self-deprecating distance. People are generally self-aware enough to know that bonding over negativity is slightly toxic. Or at least highly cynical. Right. So by turning the behavior into a noun phrase, there was grim keeping happening. You observe the behavior with a sense of ironic detachment. And the humor of the term arises entirely from the gap between the gravity of the word hatred and the utter triviality of the object being hated. Like hating raisins in bait goods. Exactly. I was reading through this linguistic breakdown, and I have to challenge the logic of the term itself, though. Okay, lay it on me. If you look at other compound words in English, ⁓ gatekeeping is the act of guarding a gate. Peacekeeping is the act of maintaining peace. Bookkeeping is keeping the books. Sure. By that literal structure, shouldn't grim keeping mean sustaining a state of misery? If two people are just keeping each other grim, how does that yield anything positive for a romantic relationship? Does this term actually make sense? That is the central paradox of the phrase, and it's a brilliant linguistic catch on your part. If you read it literally, maintaining grimness is a terrible foundation for romance. But the term is elliptical. What is being kept is not the grimness itself. The grimness is merely the tool. ⁓ I understand. What is actually being kept or maintained is the relationship. You are keeping the connection alive by means of the grimness. So the negativity is just the social glue. Precisely. And the source introduces a concept from Japanese linguistics that illustrates this dynamic perfectly. There's a Japanese word, dokutomo. I found this part of the research fascinating. How did dokutomo translate? It possesses this beautiful structural ambiguity. It translates as either Keeping a friend by means of poison or keeping poison together with a friend. Wow. That is incredibly poetic. It sounds like a Shakespearean tragedy. Doesn't it? And it perfectly mirrors the grim keeping phenomenon. In this metaphor, the shared poison is the complaint, the mutual hatred of the slow walkers or the early mornings. Right. That poison acts as the medicine that creates the initial bond, but it is simultaneously the toxic substance that sustains the exclusivity of the relationship. You cannot separate the intimacy from the toxicity. Exactly. The very same substance is both the cure for loneliness and the poison of cynicism. The poison is the medicine. That reframes the entire concept for me. Because if the language implies that we are using poison to build a bridge to another person, it forces us to ask a difficult biological question. Which is why? Why did evolution wire the human brain to prioritize a shared enemy over a shared joy? Because on the surface, For a species that requires cooperation to survive, bonding over hatred seems completely counterproductive. It does seem backwards. But to understand the mechanism, we can look at a landmark two thousand six study conducted by psychologist Jennifer Boston. What did she find? She and her colleagues designed an experiment to test interpersonal closeness, and they found a staggering result. Sharing a negative attitude toward a third party predicts closeness to a stranger much more strongly and much more rapidly than sharing a positive attitude. Meaning, if I meet a stranger, And we both love the same band, we might like each other. But if we meet and we both passionately hate the same band, we feel an instant deep kinship. Significantly deeper. And what's truly fascinating about Boston's research is that the subjects themselves were entirely unaware of this psychological bias. Really? Yeah. When asked, people consciously believed that liking the same things would make them get along better. Our conscious mind values positivity, but our subconscious behavior is driven by the exact opposite mechanism. So what is the evolutionary blueprint for that? Why are we built this way? It comes down to threat detection. Early human survival wasn't predicated on finding someone who enjoyed the same type of beeries as you. Right. Survival depended on identifying threats rapidly and building alliances to neutralize them. When you unite with a stranger over a shared aversion, you activate ancient neurological wiring that builds an immediate us against the world dynamic. You've identified a common enemy. Yes, which signals to the brain, this person recognizes the same dangers I do, therefore I am safe with them. So if we both hate the saber-toothed tiger, we're in the same tribe. Precisely. But today the saber-toothed tiger is just an annoying coworker or someone clapping when an airplane lands. ⁓ The environment has modernized, but the neurological hardware has not. And beyond survival, there's also the psychological benefit of instant authenticity. The authenticity of dropping the facade. Yes. We discussed the exhaustion of the job interview style date earlier. Walking into a date and pretending you are endlessly positive, active, and cheerful requires immense cognitive load. It's so curated. You sit there sipping your drink, nodding, pretending that you actually enjoy waking up at 5:30 AM to go to the gym. Because you want to seem like a highly functional adult. Right. But the moment the facade drops, the moment you admit, actually, I despise early mornings and I hate the gym, and your date responds with, ⁓ thank God, me too, there is an immense rush of validation and relief. You bypass the superficial interview stage completely. You plummet straight into vulnerability. It creates an instant safe harbor where you don't have to perform. It's the relief of not having to be perfect. And aside from safety and authenticity, There's another angle to this that makes a lot of logistical sense. Filter efficiency. Exactly. If you are trying to figure out if you want to integrate your life with someone, knowing what they hate seems like an incredibly efficient filter. It is the third major psychological driver here. A person's list of absolute deal breakers will reveal their core lifestyle values much faster and with far more accuracy than a sprawling generic list of hobbies. Think about a standard dating profile. If someone says I love traveling, good food, and spending time with friends. That tells me absolutely nothing. Basically every human on earth likes those things. So non-statement. But if a person says, I despise chaotic, loud bar crawls, and I hate staying out past midnight, they have just communicated a highly specific lifestyle rhythm. You instantly know if your logistical day-to-day lives are compatible. The boundary line drawn by a shared aversion automatically pushes anyone who doesn't agree into the outgroup. It efficiently narrows the dating pool to those who share your specific pace of life. It's like we aren't looking for a romantic partner to walk on the beach with. We're recruiting a co-conspirator for a heist. I love that analogy. We don't need to know what kind of art they like. We need to know what they hate, so we know they won't trigger the alarms. We need to know they're strictly on our side. That analogy hits at the core of tribalism. You are establishing an exclusive in-group. And what is terrifying is that when you scale this psychology up. Beyond a romantic date. It explains some of the most massive, divisive societal trends we are living through today. ⁓ wow. How so? We can map the exact same psychological engine driving green keeping onto the political science concept of negative partisanship. I see where you're going with this. Negative partisanship is the idea that people don't vote because they love their own political party, but because they are terrified of or deeply despise the opposing party. Exactly. And to view this completely impartially, this phenomenon is observable across the entire global political spectrum on the left and the right. The agreement that we hate that other group creates intense solidarity. Immediate solidarity among strangers. In a dating scenario, the outgroup is just people who like raisings in their cookies. It's harmless. But in politics, the outgroup becomes half of your own country's population. That is deeply unsettling. The exact same brain chemistry that makes me feel a warm, fuzzy connection with a date over a shared pet peeve is the exact same engine that scales up to create massive national polarization. Because shared aversion is the absolute shortest, most efficient path to intimacy, but it is simultaneously the ultimate engine of division. It requires an enemy to function. Which naturally forces a pivot in our discussion. Uniting against a common enemy. Is a fantastic icebreaker. It is, it cuts the tension. It builds a sense of shared team and it feels highly authentic. But what happens six months later when you run out of strangers on the subway to complain about? That's the problem. If the foundation of the house is built on the dockotomo concept of poison, how does the house stand? Let's transition into the dark side of the Grim Keep and look at the toxic relationship habits that grow from this foundation. This is where clinical psychologists and relationship experts draw a hard line. Building a long-term foundation purely on cynicism and shared complaints is structurally unsound. It fundamentally lacks the positive emotional fuel. Yes. The shared joy, mutual respect, and autonomous growth required to sustain long-term intimacy. It leads to what the research calls the hater trap. The hater trap. That sounds awful. It begins innocently enough. Complaining about universal pet peeves feels lighthearted initially. But because the brain rewards that shared negativity with dopamine and feelings of closeness, the couple begins to seek out more things to hate just to recreate that bond. So it slides from relatable venting into mean spirited gossip. Gossip, judgment of friends and family, and eventually deep seated hostility toward the world at large. And there is a very pragmatic, inevitable reality here that people ignore. If you fall in love with someone whose primary mode of interacting with the world is highly critical. Eventually the honeymoon phase will end. And when it does, they are going to turn that critical eye on you. The call is coming from inside the house. You cannot build a wall of judgment to keep the world out without eventually trapping yourself inside with the judge. Man, that's heavy. And this transitions perfectly into the insights provided by Mark Manson, who wrote a brilliant analysis of toxic relationship habits that our society has completely normalized. He outlines how these negative defensive foundations manifest in the daily friction of a relationship. Manson is so good at highlighting behaviors that we think are just normal parts of cohabitating, or things that pop culture tells us are actually romantic, but are in reality destroying the emotional safety of the partnership. His first one is devastatingly common. The relationship scorecard. The relationship scorecard is the phenomenon of meticulously keeping track of your partner's past mistakes. Not to resolve them, but to stockpile them as ammunition to justify your own current righteousness. It devolves the relationship into a competition to see who is screwed up the most over the years. And therefore who owes the other one more leeway in the present. Think about your last major argument in a relationship. Did you genuinely address the issue at hand, or did someone pull up a mistake from three years ago just to level the playing field? Manson uses a very specific, darkly funny hypothetical in the text. He says, Imagine your partner was a jerk at Cynthia's twenty eighth birthday party back in twenty ten. Okay. And that one night has proceeded to ruin your life ever since. Why? Because anytime you bring up a legitimate issue today, say you ask, Hey, why are you being so financially irresponsible lately? Your partner deflects by saying, Well, you ruined Cynthia's party a decade ago, so we're even. Wow. He refers to this dynamic as the double whammy of suckage, right? Which is a highly technical clinical term, of course. Of course. It's a double whammy because not only is the partner entirely deslecting responsibility for the current issue, but they're also ginning up resolved guilt and bitterness from the past to actively manipulate you in the present. It creates a dynamic where no issue is ever truly forgiven. Because forgiveness would mean giving up leverage. It weaponizes the past against the future. Okay, what is the next toxic habit that society normalizes? Blaming your partner for your own emotions. This is a subtle boundary issue that frequently masquerades as deep connection. It occurs when you expect your partner to constantly manage your emotional state and fix your bad days. Exactly. I could hear people pushing back on this already. Like, isn't that the entire point of a partnership? If I have a terrible day, shouldn't my partner support me? There is a vital, often misunderstood difference between healthy support and emotional enmeshment. What's the difference? Support is when you have a terrible day at work. And your partner autonomously chooses to listen, offer comfort, and empathize. Enmeshment is coming home and demanding that your partner cancel their plans, absorb your bad mood, and fix the situation. And then punishing them if they fail to perfectly regulate your emotions. Yes. Blaming them for your feelings breeds codependency and deep resentment. You must take ultimate responsibility for your own emotional regulation. That is a tough pill to swallow because it forces you to stop holding your partner hostage to your bad moves. It shifts the burden of happiness back onto the individual. It does. What is the third habit Manson identifies? Displays of loving jealousy. This is perhaps the most heavily romanticized toxic trait in our culture. ⁓ without a doubt. It involves getting intensely angry when your partner talks to someone else, snooping through their text messages while they're in the shower, demanding their passwords, or showing up unannounced to check on them. Pop culture absolutely loves to portray this as passion. Movies and music are filled with narratives implying he's just so crazy about me he can't stand the thought of anyone else looking at me. His jealousy means he cares. It is entirely, dangerously, falsely disguised as passion. In reality, it is controlling, demeaning, and highly manipulative. Jealousy of this magnitude transmits a message of total fundamental distrust. As Manson astutely points out, if you cannot trust your partner to simply exist around other human beings. You are communicating one of two things. Either you believe they are an inherent liar, or you believe they lack the basic self-control to manage their own impulses. Either way, you are not describing a foundation for respect or love. You are describing a warden and a prisoner. And speaking of control, there is a fourth concept in the sources that ties directly into this gatekeeping. We touched on this word briefly earlier when analyzing grim keeping, but let's define it formally. Dictionary definitions describe gatekeeping as the activity of trying to control who gets access to particular resources, power, or opportunities. In a sociological context, gatekeeping is a major red flag, often bordering on emotional, psychological, or financial abuse. It is the deliberate act of withholding vital information or resources in order to maintain a power imbalance. How does that actually manifest in modern dating? It sounds so clinical. It can take incredibly nuanced forms. A common modern emotional example is a partner who knows that you are seeking a committed marriage, but deliberately hides the fact that they only ever want a casual situationship. They gatekeep their true intentions to string you along. Extracting all the emotional and physical benefits of a relationship without ever paying the emotional cost of commitment. They are keeping the gate to the truth locked so you won't leave. Exactly. And in more serious long-term partnerships, it frequently manifests as financial gatekeeping. Like limiting access to bank accounts. Yes, or refusing to share financial passwords. They're using gatekeeping to enforce severe dependency. It strips the other person of their autonomy. So hearing all of this, I have to ask you to draw a line for the listener. Okay. We started by acknowledging that grim keeping bonding over shared dislikes works incredibly well on a first date to build authentic safety. But we now know it can lead to this dark side. The hater traps, the relationship scorecards. The gatekeeping. Where is the exact boundary? How does someone evaluate their own relationship and know when they've crossed from relatable venting into toxicity? The line of demarcation is progression. Authentic venting on a first date is a bridge. It gets you across the initial awkwardness. Toxicity is deciding to build your permanent house on that bridge. Wow. Deciding to build your house on the bridge. If your conversations three months in never evolve beyond complaining about what you hate, if you realize you are Actively keeping a mental scorecard of grievances, or if the shared negativity is being weaponized to control, guilt, or isolate the other person, you have crossed the line. The shared poison has consumed the medicine. That is a chilling visual. You can't live on the bridge. But apparently people are trying to. No, it's a whole dictionary. Modern daters have invented a massive, exhausting dictionary of terms just to describe the myriad ways we mistreat. Avoid and deflect each other. Which brings us to the Encyclopedia of Avoidance. Our A to Z of digital romance based on the psychology today article outlining 21 distinct terms. When you view these 21 terms collectively, they paint a rather stark sociological picture of modern intimacy. It is a vocabulary built entirely around avoidance mechanisms. Let's break this down because a list of 21 words is just a tsunami of jargon. Let's group them thematically to understand the psychology behind them. I'll call the first category the disappearing acts. A fitting title. At the forefront is the ubiquitous ghosting, the act of dropping all communication out of nowhere with zero explanation, effectively erasing yourself from someone's life. We all know the exhaustion of ghosting. But the internet has apparently decided that wasn't painful enough, so they invented clicking. Cloaking is brutal. It is. It's when you make concrete plans, you show up at the restaurant. And the person not only no shows, but they block you on every single digital platform simultaneously. You're sitting at the table, you check your phone, and they have been digitally scrubbed from existence. It is the ultimate manifestation of conflict avoidance. Then on the opposite end of the disappearing spectrum, there's the more insidious fizzling, also known as the slow fade. ⁓ a slow fade. This is the cowardly act of gradually losing interest and tapering off communication without ever offering formal closure. The responses get shorter, the time between texts. gets longer. It forces the other person to slowly, agonizingly realize they are being rejected, shifting the emotional burden and the breakup onto the victim. And then the most terrifying of all, being zombied or submarining. Zombied. This is when a person who successfully ghosted you months ago suddenly pops back up from the dead with a casual, hey, how are you? text. Acting as if absolutely nothing happened. It's a profound psychological violation because it is a complete refusal to acknowledge the emotional reality of the person they abandoned. It demands that the victim pretend the trauma of the rejection never occurred. Okay, the next category of terms is what I call the roster management suite. This is entirely about treating human beings like commodities, keeping your options open at the expense of others. First up, benching or cushioning. This is driven by the illusion of infinite choice provided by dating apps. Benching is keeping someone around as a backup option. You string them along with just enough attention to ensure they remain on the sidelines, ready to be called up if your primary romantic interest falls through. It reduces a person to an insurance policy. Related to that is bread crumbing. Sending sporadic, flirty messages, dropping little crumbs of attention, with absolutely no intention of ever pursuing a real relationship. You were just keeping someone hungry for validation. Then we have roaching. You know you are being roached when you discover the person you believe you are dating exclusively is secretly dating several other people. The metaphor is brutal but accurate. When you finally turn on the lights, you see the roaches scatter. It speaks to a deep fear of commitment masked by a facade of exclusivity. And finally in this category, pocketing. This is when you're dating someone, but they completely hide you from their friends, family, and social media. They keep the relationship in their pocket, out of the public eye. Pocketing is a compartmentalization strategy. By preventing the relationship from integrating into their real life, they maintain a barrier of casualness, ensuring it's easy to walk away without any social fallout. The final category is identity and effort. This is where the deception gets incredibly nuanced. We all know what catfishing is, creating a totally fake persona. But what is kitten fishing? Kitten fishing is a more subtle, socially acceptable form of deceit. It doesn't involve stealing someone else's photos. Instead, it relies heavily on extremely old, flattering photos, minor lies, or heavy exaggerations to present a vastly improved, heavily edited version of your actual self. It's claiming you're an avid rock climber because you went to an indoor gym once in 2014 or shaving three inches off your waistline with an angle. It is the gap between the marketing material and the actual product. Then there is woke fishing. Defining this impartially based on the text. It is the manipulative act of characterizing yourself as having liberal, progressive, or highly empathetic values in order to attract a mate who holds those beliefs when in reality you do not share them at all. It is the adoption of a political or moral identity purely as a predatory dating strategy. And finally, a crime of sheer modern laziness. Dry texting. Sending minimal effort, one word responses cool, yeah. Due to a total lack of interest or willingness to engage in the emotional labor of a conversation. What is paramount to understand here, looking at this massive list of 21 terms, is why we need this exhaustive vocabulary. The Psychology Today article points out a tragic, glaring irony. Digital technology has made human connection easier and faster than at any point in human history, yet sociological studies consistently show that people are lonelier than ever before. Why do you think that is? Why do we invent funny sci-fi-sounding words like roaching, cloaking, and submarineing? For behaviors that cause deep emotional pain. Because these terms act as psychological defense mechanisms. They allow us to compartmentalize bad behavior and intellectualize emotional trauma. If someone you care about treats you terribly, it is incredibly painful to say, I was deeply betrayed by someone I trusted. It is much easier to digest the sting of that rejection if you can slap a pseudoclinical label on it. I wasn't profoundly disrespected. I was just benched. I didn't experience abandonment. I was just ghosted. The language creates a semantic buffer against the visceral pain of modern romance. We're using a detached, almost marine biology vocabulary to mask the fact that navigating this landscape is just incredibly painful. It really is. If the landscape is this fraught, if we're dodging yap trappers, surviving the double whammy of suckage and getting cloaked by kittenfishers, how does a listener actually survive this minefield? How do we get out of these toxic cycles and find a healthy relationship? That brings us to our final discussion. Overcoming the toxicity and getting unstuck. Fortunately, the sources do not just diagnose the illness, they provide actionable, positive strategies. And it all begins with redefining how we approach the initial connection. We have to completely abandon defensive dating. Exactly. Let's talk about the positive trends because we need some hope here. The first one is hardballing. Hardballing is the practice of being radically upfront and completely honest about your intentions and desires from day one. There is no coin maneuvering, no playing hard to get, no trying to seem aloof. If you want a serious, committed relationship that leads to marriage, you state it immediately. Yes. I love that. It immediately filters out the breadcrumbers and the people looking for a situationship. They hear what you want, and if they can't provide it, they sell select out. Exactly. It requires courage, but it saves immense amounts of time. Related to this is loud looking. Loud looking. This is boldly and publicly stating that you're looking for a partner. You own your desire for human connection without the vague defensive posturing of I'm just seeing what's out there. You admit that you want love, which is a highly vulnerable thing to do in a cynical culture. And my personal favorite trend from the list, the sweatpants theory. The sweatpants theory is the idea that being comfortable, grounded, and effortlessly yourself, as if you were wearing your favorite pair of sweatpants, is immensely attractive. It is the absolute antithesis of the curated high pressure. Job interview date where you sit rigidly and pretend to be perfect. It's the confidence of saying, This is who I am in my daily life, take it or leave it. Now we also have some incredible insights from an older demographic. The source, Sixty and Me details how daters in their 60s and beyond are navigating this landscape, and they are completely shifting the paradigm. They are bringing decades of lived experience to the table, and frankly, they are refusing to waste the time they have left. Their first major piece of advice is to focus heavily on strategy. They advocate for having a literal, written, personal business plan for your dating life. Yes, a business plan. Okay, I had to push back on this pretty hard. A dating business plan sounds incredibly unromantic. If I am sitting at a desk screening potential partners through a corporate spreadsheet, looking at their assets and liabilities, doesn't that completely strip away the serendipity of falling in love? Are you just treating human beings like data points? That feels like it kills the magic entirely. It's a very valid and common criticism. We want love to feel like magic. But the dating coach from 60 and me argues the exact opposite, and her logic is compelling. What's her logic? She notes that employing this strategy yields a 65% success rate for her clients. The argument is this: strategy does not kill romance. Strategy creates the safety required for real romance to flourish. How does a business plan create safety? If you do not have a defined plan for what you will accept and what you will reject, you are susceptible to every breadcrumber and narcissist who crosses your path. You spend all your emotional energy managing anxiety and navigating toxic behavior. But if you have a strategic framework, if you know your absolute deal breakers and you enforce your boundaries ruthlessly, you eliminate the roaching and the ghosting early on. You clear the weeds. And because you aren't distracted by anxiety or game playing, when you do meet a genuinely compatible match, you actually have the emotional bandwidth to experience the magic. ⁓ I see. You aren't replacing love with a spreadsheet. You are using the spreadsheet as a bouncer at the door so that only the good people get into the club. Precisely. The older demographic also advises a massive shift in perspective. Stop obsessing over red flags and start actively hunting for green flags. We are so Culturally trained to hunt for threats, to analyze every text for a hidden toxic trait, that we entirely forget to look for positive indicators like consistency, kindness, and emotional regulation. The text had that wild story about the woman who was running background checks and using Google Lens to reverse image searchmen to reject them before she even met them. She was so terrified of missing a red flag that she was actively destroying any chance of a connection. It is a state of perpetual hypervigilance, which is exhausting and anti romantic. Finally, they recommend embracing highly niche interests on your profiles. Moving away from the generic I like hiking in movies. Yes. Instead, use profile descriptions like I collect rare nineteen seventies vinyl or I spend my weekends doing amateur glass blowing. Unvarnished authenticity is vastly superior to mass appeal. You do not need thousands of people to swipe right on you. You just need the right person to be captivated by your specific brand of weirdness. That is incredibly freeing. But before anyone can implement these positive strategies, the hardballing, the green flags, you have to know if you are currently stuck in a bad place. Because a lot of people are listening to this realizing their current relationship is built on a grimkeep foundation. Stephen J. Betchen's Insights from Psychology Today outline how to know if you are stuck in a toxic relationship and need to get out. Betchen outlines seven distinct signs of relational paralysis. These are critical tools for self evaluation. The first is somaticizing. The body keeping score. Converting emotional stress into physical symptoms. Exactly. If your body is constantly reacting to your partner with unexplained anxiety, stomach issues, chronic tension, or lethargy, your physical nervous system is expressing the fact that you feel trapped, even if your conscious mind hasn't admitted it yet. Sign number two. This is a profound indicator of emotional disconnection. ⁓ Feeling lonely when you are physically alone is natural. Feeling isolated while sitting next to the person who is supposed to be your partner is soul crushing. Sign number three, constant stress and bickering. When fighting becomes the default mode of communication, it proves an inability to resolve issues combined with a toxic intolerance to separation. You can't fix it, but you're too scared to leave. Sign number four. Feeling controlled. This ties back to gatekeeping. One partner dictates the terms of the relationship, how money is spent, who you can see, and the other acquiesces purely out of fear of retribution. It is the ultimate loss of individual autonomy. Sign number five fantasizing about other lives. And this does not just mean sexual fantasies. It is a compelling constant need to imagine a completely different life, living in a different city, having a different career, being with someone else as a mental escape hatch from your current misery. The last two signs, six and seven, really blend together for me. Staying out of an overdeveloped sense of obligation and turning the romance into an awkward business arrangement. This happens when people stay for financial reasons or because they feel guilty, or for the kids long after the love and respect have died. The relationship ceases to be a partnership and becomes a grim daily transaction. Betchen's core message is that human beings often unconsciously replicate the miserable dynamics they witnessed growing up. But You do not have to remain stuck. Taking the terrifying risk to leave is the mandatory first step toward utilizing the positive strategies we just discussed. It requires immense bravery to look at your life and admit that the foundation is cracked. We have covered an incredible amount of psychological and sociological ground today. We really have. As we wrap up this deep dive, let's synthesize the journey we've taken. We started in the wild pop culture and pews landscape of 2025. Exploring how modern daters are seeking the absolute safety of being smutten by fictional ideals while trying to survive the exhausting reality of Yap trappers. We dove into the linguistic quirks and the evolutionary biology of grim keeping, unpacking the Japanese concept of dokotomo, understanding how shared poison can act as a temporary medicine, and realizing why bonding over a shared enemy is such a powerful, yet ultimately dangerous, psychological shortcut. We called out the toxic habits that hide in plain sight, the relationship scorecards that weaponize the past, the enmeshment and the gatekeeping. We waded through the exhausting encyclopedia of digital avoidance, recognizing that terms like ghosting and submarining are just clinical shields we use to deflect profound emotional pain. But we emerged on the other side with the empowering clarity of hardballing, the unapologetic comfort of the sweatpants theory, and the vital realization that an intentional strategic business plan for your boundaries Can actually pave the way for true romance. The overarching theme of all this research is intention. Are you engaging in passive defensive dating or are you operating with clear strategy and vulnerability? And that brings us to our challenge for you, the listener, who want you to evaluate your own relational portfolio. Take a hard, honest look at the connections in your life right now. Are you bonding with your partner over shared joy, mutual respect and growth, or are you relying heavily on the fragile glue of a shared enemy? Think about your last conversation. Were you accidentally yap trapping your friends, broadcasting your own stress without asking a single question? Or are you practicing the comfortable, quiet authenticity of the sweatpants theory? It requires deep, sometimes uncomfortable honesty to evaluate our own defense mechanisms. It is much easier to point out the red flags in others than to recognize the walls we have built ourselves. It is. And I won't leave you with one final provocative thought to mull over. Inspired by everything we've read today. Over the last decade, we have invented dozens of catchy slang terms to categorize every possible dating trauma, every minor red flag, and every shared hatred. We have a word for everything that goes wrong. But if our entire romantic vocabulary is built around defense mechanisms, cynicism, and avoidance, perhaps the most radical, rebellious thing you can do in modern love isn't finding a clever new label for your pain. Perhaps the ultimate rebellion is to simply be unapologetically vulnerably positive. To risk getting your heart genuinely breaking, face to face, without the safety net of a cynical hashtag or a clinical term to hide behind. Think about that the next time you swipe right or the next time you find yourself complaining just to make a connection. It might be terrifying to drop the armor, but at least it's real. A truly profound takeaway to end on. Thank you all so much for joining us on this deep dive into the modern dating lexicon. The conversation concludes here, but the exploration continues in your own lives. Stay curious. Stay vulnerable, and we will see you on the next deep dive. Welcome to Speed Mingle, where making real connections happens in Stream, swipe, socialize, your ultimate connection network. Jump in now. Thanks for tuning in to the Speed Mingle Network.